Eutychius of Melitene
The Holy Hieromartyr Eutychius, Bishop of Melitene
Hieromartyr · Bishop · d. 1st century, at Melitene
Commemorated 28 May — Martyrdom at Melitene in Armenia Minor
Eutychius is remembered in a single line of the synaxarion: a co-worker of the holy apostles who was bishop of Melitene in Armenia Minor and who suffered for Christ there in the first century. Nothing further about him has been transmitted — no passion, no account of his preaching, no name of a persecutor, not even a manner of death. The Church keeps him on May 28 as a hieromartyr of the apostolic generation, and the whole of what can honestly be said about him is that the memory of a bishop-martyr of Melitene from the very first age of the Church was preserved at Constantinople and passed into the Menaion under that description.
The record
The transmitted notice is one sentence long. In the Greek books he is Εὐτύχιος ὁ ἱερομάρτυς, ἐπίσκοπος Μελιτηνῆς; the Slavonic and the OCA notices add that he was a συνεργός τῶν ἀποστόλων, a fellow-worker of the apostles, and that he suffered in the city of Melitene in the first century. There is no passion, no acta, no cycle of miracles, and no attempt in any source to fill the silence — a rare and welcome restraint in the hagiographic tradition. What survives is a name, a see, an age and a crown.
Melitene
The see itself is not obscure, and it matters for the plausibility of the notice. Melitene — the modern Malatya in eastern Turkey, on the upper Euphrates — was the chief city of Armenia Minor and, from the reign of Trajan onward, a great Roman legionary base guarding the Euphrates crossings; the Legio XII Fulminata was quartered there. It lay on the route by which Christianity travelled from Syria and Cappadocia into Armenia and Mesopotamia, and it later became one of the most productive martyr-cities of the Byzantine calendar: the Thirty-Three Martyrs of Melitene under Diocletian (November 7, headed by Hieron), the soldier-martyr Polyeuctus of Melitene (January 9), and, in the fourth century, the great bishop Acacius and his successors. A Christian community at Melitene in the apostolic age is not documented, but neither is it improbable in a garrison city on that road; and the Church's memory of a first bishop who died for Christ there is exactly the kind of tradition that a local church preserves when it preserves nothing else.
Feast and commemoration
May 28 (church date; New Calendar civil May 28, Old Calendar civil June 10). In the Greek Menaion and the Great Synaxaristes Eutychius stands first in the day's list and is the titular commemoration of May 28; the same order is kept in the Antiochian and Greek calendars. In the Russian books he is displaced to fifth or sixth place by the Slavonic commemorations of the day, chiefly Nicetas of Chalcedon and Ignatius of Rostov. No proper akolouthia is transmitted; he is served from the common of a hieromartyr. The day falls always within the Pentecostarion, and his hymns are sung with the propers of the season.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hieromartyr)
As a sharer in the ways and a successor to the thrones of the Apostles, thou didst find in action the means to ascend to divine contemplation, O divinely-inspired one; wherefore, rightly dividing the word of truth, thou didst also contend for the faith even unto blood, O hieromartyr Eutychius: intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
No individual iconography of Eutychius has been identified, and none is likely to exist apart from the painted menologia. Where he is depicted at all he takes the standard hieromartyr-hierarch form: a bishop of middle years, vested in phelonion and omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the Gospel in the left, and marked as a martyr by a small cross held upright in the right hand or by the red of the vesture. The apostolic dating would in principle allow him to be painted in the antique manner — bare head, tunic and mantle, as the apostles and their immediate disciples are shown — but no example is known. Wikimedia Commons returns nothing for the saint under any form of the name (Greek, Slavonic or Latin); the seventeenth-century Russian menologion icon for May in the Church-Archaeological Cabinet collection presumably includes him among its ranks of small figures, but the individual figures are unlabelled at any available resolution and it cannot be used to identify him.
Disputed questions
- The first-century dating is the notice's own claim, and it stands alone. No independent source names a bishop of Melitene before the fourth century, when the episcopal succession of the city becomes visible in the conciliar records. Whether Eutychius belongs to the apostolic generation, or whether an early-Christian bishop-martyr of Melitene was drawn back into it by the customary attraction of an unnamed antiquity toward the apostles, cannot be settled from the surviving material. The entry keeps the transmitted date and marks it as transmitted.
- "Co-worker of the apostles" is the notice's phrase and not a title of the Seventy: he is not listed in the traditional rolls of the Seventy Apostles, and he does not appear in the Synaxis of the Seventy Apostles on January 4. Some Slavonic notices, reading the phrase as an equivalent, have promoted him to the Seventy; the Greek books do not.
- Not to be confused with Eutychius of Constantinople (April 6, †582), the patriarch of the age of Justinian and the Fifth Ecumenical Council — a hierarch, not a martyr, and five centuries later. The bare form "Saint Eutychius the bishop" is used of both.
- Not to be confused with the Eutychius who is one of the four martyrs Bassus, Eusebius, Eutychius and Basilides (January 20), nor with the martyrs of Melitene proper — the company of Hieron and his thirty-two companions (November 7), who suffered in the same city three centuries later and whose commemoration is sometimes cited in place of his.
- The name. Εὐτύχιος / Εὐτύχης ("fortunate") was among the commonest names in the Greek east and is borne by at least a dozen saints of the calendar; the Latin martyrologies multiply the confusion by rendering the same man now Eutychius, now Eutyches, now Eutychus.